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Hearts for Evona

One of the members of my online quilt guild, the Cyberbees, lost her husband unexpectedly. As is our tradition, the Cyberbees will shower her with a “Heart Attack,” heart blocks, hopefully enough for her to make a quilt out of someday.

Sadly, we’ve had several occasions like this, but when we do, I like to use the opportunity to try a new design or method. There are a lot more ways to make a heart block than just appliqueing the traditional shape to a square piece of fabric.

The method I’m trying this time is from the book “appli-curves” by Elaine Waldschmitt. I saw her demonstrate the technique on an episode of Sewing with Nancy not long ago and made a mental note that I wanted to try this someday. I was at Joann’s a few weeks ago and actually found one copy of the book (with a CD of templates included) but it had a few pages near the front that were ripped near the binding. These pages didn’t affect the important parts of the book so I negotiated a deeply discounted price. Yippee!

Without giving all of Elaine’s secrets away, the idea of “appli-curves” is to replace some traditionally pieced elements with ones that are appliqued instead. The problem I ran into right off the bat is sizing. We are making 6.5″ unfinished blocks. I had scanned the template I needed, brought it into EQ7 and traced it. I then set the motif on a 6″ finished block (Electric Quilt works with finished sizes) and printed out the template. Because of the construction technique, I wasn’t sure if this template would really work. So I read through the book’s instructions more closely and realized that Ms. Waldschmitt doesn’t give you any tips for making her blocks in other sizes, all the instructions are for the one size. I emailed her and asked her for guidance to make a smaller, 6″ block and she didn’t have any ideas. So, I got out my proportion wheel and determined that I needed to reduce her template by 77-78%. I did that on a copy machine and the template is much larger than what I got out of EQ7. So for now, I’m going with that.

I have to make 2 blocks, cut them in half diagonally and sew the opposite halves back together. This one step is the one that I feel makes my EQ template worthless unless I can figure out how to size the template proportionately. Just making the block a normal finished size isn’t going to cut it.

So here are my hearts with Heat and Bond Lite attached. This is a test block for size and any other unforeseen complications. Like this next one.

Uh oh, the adhesive shows through the white fabric! This is from my stash, so I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t thin. I do fusible applique all the time and I’ve never come across this problem before. Thank goodness this is just a test.

Here the hearts have been appliqued to the background fabric (across the top only).

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Robin I like the blocks of hearts wow you should put more like this and maybe some of us untalented girls might want to copy and do some of them for our use.. I really like them and didnt even think to do it that way…I was trying to put two hearts together like joined together forever with hearts,,,,,TIna